spotlight on songstory: mine

Here's a little taste of what I'll be reading at SongStory, at Someday Lounge, coming up on March 7th.

Tackle Box

I took a career test in college, the kind where you answer questions about your interests by filling in the little circles and then the computer spits out proposed careers and courses of study. When I got the results back, they said I had unrealistic goals and would have to readjust my aspirations if I ever wanted to amount to anything.

What the computer didn’t know is that what I wanted to amount to was a circus clown. At the time, I was dating a circus clown—and, in my nineteen-year-old sureness and my nineteen-year-old naïveté, figured I’d be marrying a circus clown. And whereas my nineteen-year-old sureness was more like thirty-five-year-old sureness, my nineteen-year-old naïveté was really probably twelve-year-old naïveté, which means I was really, really sure. I was going to marry him and go off on the road with a brand new, readymade career and a brand new readymade dream, to match all the overblown and under-accomplished ambitions of my earlier days.

My first ambition in life was to sing Annie on Broadway. I saw the musical in L. A., and as I floated there somewhere between the dark of my seat and the bright of the stage, there seemed nothing more delicious than tragic, singing orphans. Annie’s voice, so big and brass, I could feel that sound like it was coming right out of my chest. I decided in an eight-year-old instant that this was the life for me. In order to attain this goal, I sang Annie’s songs quietly into a cassette recorder and only showed my mom.

[i'm the one on the right. i don't know if i ever noticed before but mom and i are both wearing the same kind of flop-neck turtleneck, striped.]

I'll will be reading with Kevin Sampsell, Lidia Yuknavitch, Courtenay Hameister, Brad Rosen and Vanessa Veselka on March 7th at Someday Lounge as part of the March Music Moderne music festival.

Facebook invite is here. And info on the other great events that are part of March Music Moderne is here.